Business events are a great place to grow your network in person and can be a winning strategy for finding new clients. But why wait until the event itself? We have some great hacks to share with you on ways to harness events in ways you probably haven't yet tried. Intrigued? Then read on.....
With Dux-Soup, you can improve your event strategy with tricks that you can use in advance of the event to maximize your outreach and drive sales appointments to grow your pipeline. And you don't even have to be running the event. We're going to show you how to leverage competitor and industry events to drive your own sales growth.
To follow along, you'll need Dux-Soup, but you can grab a free trial here - so go ahead and install Dux-Soup before you go any further.
In this article, our Head of Sales, Scott Wright, reveals his 4-point strategy for securing sales appointments before, during, and after an event, including:
• Hacks to generate targeted lists of event attendees
• LinkedIn messaging templates to drive engagement around the event
• How to leverage and benefit from a competitor’s event content
• Proven approaches to secure face-to-face appointments
This blog is covered in a webinar, complete with demos if you'd like to see it in action.
Whether you’re hosting or sponsoring an event, whether you’re attending yourself or staying behind to manage the operation remotely, this is a repeatable strategy to generate leads and secure sales appointments and you can start using it straight away.
Dux-Soup and events
If you’re wondering where Dux-Soup fits with business events, the answer is simple: you can use Dux-Soup before, during, and after any event to top up your sales pipeline.
- Dux-Soup can be used to automate your event outreach; to set up meetings before the event, to promote the event and send invites to the event
- LinkedIn was originally designed for networking. Dux-Soup is great for setting up in-person meetings at events.
- To build engagement and rapport, take an indirect selling approach and make your conversations about the event, rather than your sponsorship of the event or what your company sells.
- Use the event as a conversation starter with your targets. Events offer an easy introduction, and if they’re not attending the event it doesn’t matter, if they reply to you it’s still an opportunity to pivot the conversation in a different direction.
- Utilize Dux-Soup to automate post-event follow-ups with people who attended the event or to retarget everyone invited to the event.
Before you start the event
Take the time to plan out your campaigns in Dux-Soup. Are you targeting your automating LinkedIn messages to your existing 1st-degree network, or will you be sending out connection requests to your 2nd and 3rd connections? If you’re targeting both groups, send a different campaign to each.
Why?
If you’re targeting your existing network, you may have left that conversation open and the message will require a different approach.
A campaign to 2nd and 3rd-degree connections will require a connection request that people can accept at different times. Time your connection invitation so it’s sent out a few weeks ahead of the event. You don’t want people accepting it after the event when you want to move on to the follow-up messages.
If you’re attending an in-person event, plan how you will coordinate the logistics and meet with people in your network when you’re there. This includes asking for phone numbers and the physical location at the event where you can meet.
Think through your list of targets. Are they speakers? Are they attendees? Or will you target people located in the area of the event that meet your Ideal Customer Profile who might be attending, but you don’t actually know?
Start promoting the campaign 2-3 weeks ahead of the event, any earlier and there’s a good chance people will say they’ll be there and want to meet you, and then forget. Two to three weeks out will give you time to send the connection request message, have them accept and receive your follow-up messages.
Scott is very clear about the communication approach:
“It’s not about you…it’s about the event. You’re leveraging the fact that you’re both interested in and potentially attending the same event, and you’re using that as your conversation starter.”
Different Events, Different Approaches
The type of event will determine the approach you take. Let’s look at a few situations and styles of workflow:
When you’re attending an event you probably won’t have an attendee list so focus on your Ideal Customer Profile in the location of the event. Your networking and connection requests focus on the event, even if you know they are going to attend don’t call it out explicitly - your inside knowledge could make them feel uncomfortable! Keep it light, it’s a conversation starter that people will want to reply to.
As a sponsor at an event, take a similar approach with the connection request as you would an attendee. When you get there, use your booth or sponsored area to meet up.
While you’re at the event, tap the event coordinator on the shoulder and see if you can get an attendee list, or some information about the visitors which you can target afterward. Or sponsor the guest WiFi network to capture attendee data via a bespoke captive portal.
Often an event will have a happy hour or off-site activities and if you’re a sponsor it’s an opportunity that’s too good to miss!
Again, start by asking if they’ve heard of the event, and once you’ve connected extend an invite to the happy hour with a link to a form that they can fill out to join you.
If you’re speaking at the conference, or your CEO or exec is speaking and you’re attending, find out if the target has some insight on the event.
After the event
Once the event has passed, go into Dux-Soup and adjust any 2nd/3rd-degree event campaigns by either:
- Turning them off
- Removing the follow-ups
- Adjusting all the follow-ups to make sense after the event
Use Dux-Soup to send a follow-up to all that have not yet replied:
- Ask them if they attended
- Ask them how it was
- Share your experience of the event. For example: “Did you attend xyz last week?”, “How was xyz for you?” or “How was your talk? I was only able to catch a part of it but the turnout looked decent”
Target Keynote Speakers
Let’s look at how to find and build a list for Dux-Soup ahead of an event:
1. Start by using Google to find the speakers for your event or conference
2. Copy and paste the list of speakers into ChatGPT with the instruction to “Organise into headers and columns”
3. Copy and paste the formatted data into a Google sheet (Column headings: ‘First name’, ‘Last name’, ‘title’ and ‘company’)
4. To get the LinkedIn URL for each name, Scott uses a Google Sheets formula. This allows you to find the LinkedIn profiles of up to 100 people per day for free. Follow this LinkedIn tutorial to implement and then do a spot check for accuracy when it’s complete
5. Now you have the list of speakers, go into Dux-Soup you'll need (Turbo or Cloud) and create your campaign
Here’s an example that leverages the event Black Hat USA 2024:
6. In the Dux-Soup Funnel Flow select “Enroll from clipboard” and paste in the list of LinkedIn profiles
7. Select the campaign name and press “Enroll” and Dux-Soup will schedule the enrollment of all the people into the campaign
Competitor event posts
You can also use competitor event posts, here’s how:
1. Search LinkedIn for posts with a good level of engagement about the event you’re interested in. For example:
2. Click on the “Reactions” icon and the Dux-Soup icon will turn green and you get a pop-up saying “Dux-Soup at your service” - this means Dux is ready to work
3. Click on the Dux-Soup extension and select “Scan profiles”. The surface-level data of all the reactions is scanned. Dux-Soup scans through the LinkedIn accounts extracting surface-level information without actually viewing the profiles
4. When scanning has finished, click the download arrow
5. Open a blank Google Sheet, select “File”, “Import”, then “upload” and select the Dux-Soup scan data file in the “Downloads”
6. Filter out of the spreadsheet anyone who works for the organisation in the LinkedIn post. Now you have a list of potential attendees for the event
7. You can go one step further and filter it to your Ideal Customer Profile
8. Go to your Dux-Dash and create a new campaign
Start with a Connection Request:
“Hi_FN_, always good to connect with others in the space. BTW are you planning on attending Blackhat this year?
Follow-Up message #1 (3 hours after connecting):
“Thanks for the connection _FN_.
Are you heading to Blackhat this year? Should be interesting given the recent crowdstrike incident.
Also heard that Splunk is throwing a pretty sweet party at an ice bat? Might try to attend that.”
With virtual events on LinkedIn, as long as you register or attend you should then be able to see the attendee list. Use Dux-Soup to scan and scrub the list and it’s ready to load into a campaign.
These campaigns are not pitches, they’re not promoting a product, nor are they about the company. They simply leverage the one thing you have in common - an upcoming event. LinkedIn is for networking and the event is your foot in the door to start up a conversation which you can then pivot to your call to action. Whether you choose to attend each event…we’ll leave that up to you!
In Summary
Using your intuition to identify and leverage insights from LinkedIn that you can socially engineer is going to give your network a huge boost. Combined with a little technical know-how and personalized messages written in a casual, networking format this will build your leads in a meaningful way and serve you well both now and in the future.
Business events are a great place to grow your network with Scott’s proven strategy:
- The goal is to meet the prospects at the event or use the event as your common ground to set the meeting.
- Plan out different campaigns for different purposes depending on your circumstances e.g., sponsor, attendee, speaker).
- Leverage Google for speaker lists and LinkedIn for competitor’s posts.
- Plan out where and how you will meet your prospects in person.
- Follow up after the event - you now have something in common.
Best of luck using events and if you have any questions you can get in touch with our customer support team via the live chat, or send us an email:info@dux-soup.com.
